DISCLAIMER: I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a mental health expert. I'm just one blogger with experiences and opinions. YMMV. And honestly, this is just a ramble.
How do you tell the difference between clinically depressed and just stressed to one's breaking point?
I don't know.
I think that a lot of what I thought was my depression could more accurately be called poor handling of very stressful situations.
I don't handle failure well. And a lot of the problems of my personal "great tribulation" were self-inflicted. A wiser man would've avoided them.
Not only have I made it through hell (or the closest I've ever been to it), but the hell in my mind has decreased to a mostly-manageable regret and self-loathing about the poor choices made in my 20s. I finally have hope about the future (a combination of trust in a good God who has been there for me, and a reasonable measurement of where I am right now)
So although I've peeked into the abyss...there are people with a different set of problems, whether chemical, biological, financial, relational...God only knows.
I thought that things couldn't get better, only worse. And from my worst moment...things did get worse before they got better.
But they did get better.
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Saturday, January 23, 2016
MMXVI
Welcome to 2016.
(scratch cliches)
(scratch snark)
New year, new chance to make the same changes I've known I've needed to make for a while.
New year, starting mostly better than where I was on 1-1-15. But...there's so much I could be doing better.
Ah, the resolutions...
"Blog every weekday" - HA!
"Keep up on house & lawn maintenance" - slight improvement
"Work on my character" - sigh. No improvement. Surviving hell does not make a man a better man. Neither do near-death experiences.
"Do something especially nice for my wife every week." A nice idea, and I did one thing nice so far...long way to go on that.
"Get down to 200#" HA!
"Walk a mile a day" HA! Except for when I was working last year 1.5 miles from home, and sometimes it was just easier to let my wife take the car and have me foot it to work.
"Reconnect with my faith." Well, a little. Not where I should be.
"Decide political goals by end of year."...what?
Yeah. These were my goals as posted on my xanga on 1/3/2012. And, if anyone cares, I'm up to 240# now.
Some things don't change, and it really sucks. I want to be a better man, but I've shown myself unwilling to put in the disciplines necessary to become that better man.
Sigh.
(scratch cliches)
(scratch snark)
New year, new chance to make the same changes I've known I've needed to make for a while.
New year, starting mostly better than where I was on 1-1-15. But...there's so much I could be doing better.
Ah, the resolutions...
"Blog every weekday" - HA!
"Keep up on house & lawn maintenance" - slight improvement
"Work on my character" - sigh. No improvement. Surviving hell does not make a man a better man. Neither do near-death experiences.
"Do something especially nice for my wife every week." A nice idea, and I did one thing nice so far...long way to go on that.
"Get down to 200#" HA!
"Walk a mile a day" HA! Except for when I was working last year 1.5 miles from home, and sometimes it was just easier to let my wife take the car and have me foot it to work.
"Reconnect with my faith." Well, a little. Not where I should be.
"Decide political goals by end of year."...what?
Yeah. These were my goals as posted on my xanga on 1/3/2012. And, if anyone cares, I'm up to 240# now.
Some things don't change, and it really sucks. I want to be a better man, but I've shown myself unwilling to put in the disciplines necessary to become that better man.
Sigh.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Steven 100
So this marks my 100th blog on this board. No idea how many hundred blogs are left on xanga. Looking over the categories I founded this blog on, I've said a lot. Sometimes just the same thing over and over again.
In regards to depression, which I thought I might be blogging more about when I started, or maybe I knew I wouldn't because such a subject is so sensitive, I was depressed, stressed, lonely, and isolated both geographically and in other ways. Now I'm just, as I've been for years, lonely.
My family posts have been mostly about my father and grandfather. Two of the great influences on my life, both deceased, both missed. I don't blog much about my family at home, or my mom's family, or my in-laws, for various reasons, the same reasons I didn't blog about them much when I was blogging more often.
Genius? (Insert painful half-laugh here ) I said to myself, "I have reached greatness, and am smarter than all before me in Leavenworth. I have understood great wisdom and knowledge." And I set to now wisdom, madness, and folly. What a waste of time. For in much wisdom is grief, and the know-it-all ends up lonely.
Ecclesiastes 1:16-18, paraphrased. And even now, I suppose I am most aware of what I don't know, the flaws in my own argument and point of view. Between that and the niche nature of what I know what I mean expert in, to say. And it hurts so bad.
I once was more into politics. Heck, I once was an elected official. But that was then and this is now. And yes, for reasons other than most of my friends, I feel the media is failing us. As stated before, I feel our 24 hour news cycle and ratings hunt lead us to an unhealthy overemphasis of a few cases rather than the larger problems that affect us.
It's quite different blogging about KC sports when they're all winning. Sporting won the cup in '13, a different cup in '15. Royals won two pennants and a world series in the last two years. And, finally, the Chiefs won a playoff game! So the woe-is-us is rather over.
Haven't blogged about technology much, mainly because modern technology (defined as WiFi and modern tablets) is - at this point - a luxury that I've had to cut. And sometimes I miss it, and sometimes I don't.
Truth. Quid est veritas. Most of the posts were me trying to sort out various prophetic claims, religious points of view, and other Christian drama. And, when a genius tries to look at both sides of an interpretation argument...I just get headaches.
More blogs coming. There's a lot of Saturdays left in 2016.
In regards to depression, which I thought I might be blogging more about when I started, or maybe I knew I wouldn't because such a subject is so sensitive, I was depressed, stressed, lonely, and isolated both geographically and in other ways. Now I'm just, as I've been for years, lonely.
My family posts have been mostly about my father and grandfather. Two of the great influences on my life, both deceased, both missed. I don't blog much about my family at home, or my mom's family, or my in-laws, for various reasons, the same reasons I didn't blog about them much when I was blogging more often.
Genius? (Insert painful half-laugh here ) I said to myself, "I have reached greatness, and am smarter than all before me in Leavenworth. I have understood great wisdom and knowledge." And I set to now wisdom, madness, and folly. What a waste of time. For in much wisdom is grief, and the know-it-all ends up lonely.
Ecclesiastes 1:16-18, paraphrased. And even now, I suppose I am most aware of what I don't know, the flaws in my own argument and point of view. Between that and the niche nature of what I know what I mean expert in, to say. And it hurts so bad.
I once was more into politics. Heck, I once was an elected official. But that was then and this is now. And yes, for reasons other than most of my friends, I feel the media is failing us. As stated before, I feel our 24 hour news cycle and ratings hunt lead us to an unhealthy overemphasis of a few cases rather than the larger problems that affect us.
It's quite different blogging about KC sports when they're all winning. Sporting won the cup in '13, a different cup in '15. Royals won two pennants and a world series in the last two years. And, finally, the Chiefs won a playoff game! So the woe-is-us is rather over.
Haven't blogged about technology much, mainly because modern technology (defined as WiFi and modern tablets) is - at this point - a luxury that I've had to cut. And sometimes I miss it, and sometimes I don't.
Truth. Quid est veritas. Most of the posts were me trying to sort out various prophetic claims, religious points of view, and other Christian drama. And, when a genius tries to look at both sides of an interpretation argument...I just get headaches.
More blogs coming. There's a lot of Saturdays left in 2016.
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